Grant: Alliance Grants

There are conflicting challenges in aeronautics. On one side, air traffic is growing, with the need to increase capacity and reduce travel time while maintaining or improving safety, and concurrently reduce emissions to mitigate climate change. It is evident that evolutionary solutions will not suffice to meet the challenging targets in terms of environmental impact reduction, while ensuring competitiveness of the Canadian aviation and associated supply chain industries. In the search for revolutionary solutions, ORCA-AIR proposes to leverage the knowledge, expertise and experimental facilities in 'design, build, test and fly' to buttress the development of green aviation with the development of an aerodynamically efficient blended-wing-body aircraft configuration.ORCA-AIR is proposing to study the blended-wing-body aircraft configuration that will impact on two significant levers for reduction of fuel burn needed for future clean aviation: improved aerodynamics and weight reduction. The lightweight blended-wing-body configuration has been shown to reduce drag and improve lift thus contributing to emissions reduction. More specifically, the goal is to characterize the aeroservoelastic behaviour of a BWB with flexible wings to achieve key performance, stability and control requirements, while improving energetic efficiency.